Highlights From the Archives

Hunter Thompson was always much more, and sometimes a bit less, than the sum of his ribald public persona. “Gonzo” by Jann Wenner and Corey Seymour is a wonderfully entertaining chronicle of Hunter’s wild ride, but it is also a detailed, painful account of his self-destructive immersions; and the anguish of a life that veered from inspired performance art to ruinous solipsism.

Somewhere beneath the cartoon -- he was Uncle Duke in the Doonesbury strip, of course, but Bill Murray inked him well in the 1980 film ''Where the Buffalo Roam'' -- and a lifestyle dominated by a long and sophisticated romance with drugs, Hunter S. Thompson managed to change the course of American journalism.

Hunter S. Thompson, the anger-driven, drug-fueled writer for Rolling Stone magazine whose obscenity-laced prose broke down the wall between reader and writer, writer and subject, shot and killed himself on Sunday at his home in Woody Creek, Colo. He was 67.

On Sunday, April 5, the artist Ralph Steadman and the director Terry Gilliam met at Mr. Steadman's house in the English countryside to talk about Mr. Gilliam's new movie, ''Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,'' which was based on the landmark 1971 document of American cultural disequilibrium written by Hunter S. Thompson and illustrated by Mr. Steadman.

The front gate to Hunter S. Thompson's log-cabin-style ranch is flanked by two hunks of metal folded like origami into shapes resembling vultures. These twin sentries convey both a promise and a threat: you are entering the realm of the seriously weird, and you may not get out alive.

A brisk wind is blustering down from the snow-capped Rockies as Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, clutching a Bloody Mary, shifts his red Chevrolet Caprice Classic convertible into high gear. The crazed renegade of American letters, self-styled "lazy drunken hillbilly" and Gonzo journalist supreme has decided to "stretch the Chevy out a little bit," with the top down. As the speedometer jumps toward 95 miles per hour, he explains through the icy gusts and the frenetic crackle of a pathetic radio that "driving is one of my favorite things because I'm good at it."

June 10, 2009, Wednesday

Among the members of the news media covering Senator John McCain on Thursday at the Aspen Institute was Anita Thompson, the widow of Hunter S. Thompson, the legendary journalist who brought his gonzo style of personal reporting to politics in the...